Just a quick link referral today, I had the privilege to be interviewed by the great guys over at OpenTechCast during the UK VMUG in Birmingham a while back about the recent datacenter networking article, more in the pipeline as well as system architecture and design, also a nice little prod at the end about […]

I had a bit of a storage outage in my lab due to a funky behaviour on the Synology that I use as primary storage for all my VMs: Today I Learned: Adding IP address to interfaces on Synology causes reboots :/ Lab now in not such great shape. 80 VMs with APD. #vExpert — […]

On a bit of a shorter note to my previous article/novella1https://blah.cloud/architecture/designing-modern-private-cloud-network/ – I have been moving my lab to a bit more of an “enterprise” style architecture – deploying SRM was in the way for that, so I had the need to set up another vCenter, however this gave the opportunity to move to a […]

Over the last 12 months my posting has been dialled back, this isn’t for lack of wanting or ideas, mainly a lack of time and mental bandwidth. Reason being, I have been designing and implementing a new cloud platform (namely “STC”1https://www.novosco.com/cloud-solutions/single-tenant-cloud) for my employer, Novosco – as with any new service or product this requires […]

I have been meaning to write this for a very long time, finally inspired by seeing Russell Pope’s absolutely insane lab in the vExpert Slack and Mark Brookfield‘s homelab post it started when my lab was a single Dell R710 with 96GB RAM and 2x X5670 procs. The home lab has stopped being a lab […]

This article was written a few years back, but never published – it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch. It in no way should be used for production, but rather as […]

Following on from my previous post on configuring custom ESXi images for PXE deployment, it piqued my interest again in Auto Deploy, now that I have a lab large enough (enough physical failure domains) to justify auto-deploy I figured i’d give it another go. I have chosen to implement stateless caching as it will allow […]

I have recently been working on a larger scale platform for my employer, it requires quick deployments of environments on VSAN with some standardised VIBs added in, initially we were doing this with a standard ESXi ISO install through iDRAC and then installing vCenter, vSphere Update Manager and pushing the VIBs to the hosts via […]

I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer in my lab recently – it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t […]

My lab is not what you’d call typical in any way, a kit list will i’m sure come up in a future post, but I have what is analogous to a “primary” DC and a “backup” DC with regard to physical premises. The problem is, I live in the secondary with other human beings, meaning […]

Myles Gray

I am a Senior Technical Marketing Architect for VMware in the Storage and Availability Business Unit. Focused primarily on content generation, product enablement and feedback from customers and field to engineering. Read More…